The Antitheist
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The Same Break in the Same Place

The doctrine needs humans to have been made apart from every other animal. That is a claim about ancestry, and the human genome carries a broken gene that answers it.

The claim is that humans were made separately. Not descended from an earlier animal and not modified from one, but made as humans, with no ancestor in common with anything else alive. The organizations that teach it do not treat it as optional, because the rest of the doctrine stands on it. A first couple, a fall, and an inherited fault in need of a remedy all require that the first couple existed.

That makes it a claim about ancestry, and ancestry leaves a record. A genome carries its copying errors forward. A line made apart would carry its own errors and nobody else's.

Consider what the human genome would hold on that account. Shared working parts would be no surprise. A designer may reuse what works, and that reply has been given for a century. Mistakes are another matter, because a broken gene does no work and there is nothing in it to reuse. Where humans carry damage, the damage should be theirs alone.

Humans cannot make vitamin C, and most mammals can. The gene for the last step is still in the human genome, at the usual address, wrecked. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and macaques carry the same wreck in the same place, and the damage lines up from one species to the next. The guinea pig lost the ability too, in a separate event tens of millions of years later, and its copy carries its own pattern of damage. So the gene can be broken more than one way. Among the primates it was broken one way.

The reply in print does not dispute the wreck. A paper in the research journal of Answers in Genesis accepts that the gene is dead in humans, and holds that it broke independently in humans, chimpanzees and gorillas as their genomes ran down. That accounts for a broken gene. It does not account for the match. An independent break is what the guinea pig has, and the guinea pig's damage is its own. The reply needs separate accidents to land the same way in every ape and monkey, and then needs the match to be chance.

Notice what the reply costs. Decay is brought in to explain the damage. The damage is then the evidence that the first couple had ancestors, and shared them with chimpanzees.

None of this shows there is no designer. A designer could work through descent, and a great many believers hold that one did. What the record rules out is narrower, and it is the human made apart. The narrow claim is also the one carrying the weight. Without a first couple, the account of what went wrong and why it needed a remedy has to be written again, and that is the reason the claim gets defended at this price.

There is a test in this, and the data for it is public. Take any other gene that is broken in humans. Find which other species carry it broken in the same spot. Then compare that list with the family tree drawn from bones a century earlier. Under separate creation the two have no reason to agree. They keep agreeing.

Sources

– The Antitheist

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